NOTES: Lyotard, Answering the Question: What Is Postmodernism

NOTES: Lyotard, Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism?

A DEMAND

I a. Instantly asserts that we are a period of “slackening”. b. There is a feeling of urgency to stop experimentation in cultural production (art mainly). c. Rants about different theorists and essays he has encountered about postmodernism.

II a. In the postmodern condition, the neoconservative’s aim to rid of the ‘unfinished’ project of Enlightenment, which modernity thrives on. b. Habermas sees this as negative because he sees emancipatory facets within Enlightenment ideologies. c. Habermas: where modernity failed is that the ‘totality’ of life has ‘splintered’ or atominized narrow and ‘specialized’ fields. This only allows a small percentage of the population, the “experts” to participate in these demarcated fields. d. In turn, the ‘concrete individual’ [which I think refers to the everyman] is not on this ‘liberating’ venture in the project of modernity, leaving him to “immense ennui”. e. Habermas contends that in order to leave this state, our aesthetic experience must shift from the judgments originating from taste to a subjectivity that bases judgments on comparative contingent and historical situations. f. “Habermas considers that the remedy for this splintering of culture and its separation from life can only come from ‘changing the status of aesthetic experience when it is no longer primarily expressed in judgments of taste,’ but when it is ‘used to explore a living historical situation’, that is, when ‘it is put in relation with problems of existence.’” g. To create a unity of experience, this undoing of the atomizing effects of modernity requires a bridging the gap between the cognitive, ethical, and political discourses. h. Lyotard asks: What kind of unity does Habermas have in mind? i. Can the world really be summed up in a ‘dialectically totalizing experience’; can we comprehend it holistically (based on Hegel)? Or does Postmodernism serve as a reexamination of Elightenment values (based on Kant)?

REALISM

III a. There has always been a call for order, a call for a unitarirly experience. b. “But in the diverse invitations to suspend artistic experimentation, there is an identical call for order, a desire for unity, for identity, for security or popularity (in the sense of Offentlichkeit, of ‘finding a public’). Artists and writers must be brought back into the bosom of the community, or atleast, if the latter is considered to be ill, the must be assigned the task of healing it.” IV a. In order to do this the avant-garde must be liquidated, and artists and critics feel most confident doing this by launching a frontal attack. b. The bougious era of art were part of the realist movement. c. However, Lyotard blames capitalism of having the power to derealize familuar objecs, social roles, and institutions to such a degree that “realistic” representations can no longer evoke reality. d. “Classism seems to be ruled out in a world in whoch reality is so destabilized that it offers no occasion for experience but one for ratings and experimentations.” e. When mechanical reproduction were able to become substitutes of the hand or craft, this only became a distaster because it negated bougious ideologies- art in its essence should be the expression of an indulviduality of genius assisted by an elite craftsmanship.

V a. This destabilizes realism because the object is to stablize the referent (objective reality), but cinema and photography does that much better then painting or the novel could do. b. Therefore, the rules of art must change with the changing of the times. c. “Those who refuse to reexamine the rules of art pursue successful carrers in mass conformism by communicating, by means of the ‘correct rules’, the endemic desire for reality with objects and situations capable of gratifying it.” d. Those who question the rules of art rather than comforming to them are bastardized by those who are concerned with “reality” and idenity”. They have no garenteed audience. e. Thierry de Duve: The modern aesthetic question is not “What is beautiful?”, but “What can be said to be art?”.

VI a. Ecelcticism is the degree zero of contemporary general culture. b. Lyotard claims that art has become kitsch. “By becoming kitsch, art panders to the confusion which reigns in the ‘taste’ of the patrons.” ANYTHING GOES, THIS IS HOW WE’RE IN A PERIOD OF SLACKENING. c. Art is no longer valued by its asethtic criteria, but value can now be gaged according to the profits they yield.

VII a. “The objects and thoughts which orginiate in scientific knowlage and the capitalist economy convey with them one of the rules which supports their possibility: the rule that there is no reality unless testified by a consencus between partners over a certain knowlage and certain commitments.” b. Thid thought has rid of the metaphysical, religious, and political certainties we once had as a society. c. “Modernity, in whatever age it appears, cannot exist without a shattering of belif and without discovery of the ‘lack of reality’ of reality, together with the invention of other realities.” THIS IS ALIGNED WITH NIETZCHE’S NIHILISM. d. However, Lyotard sees this style of thought influenced by the Kantian theme of the sublime. e. “I think in particular that it is in the aesthetics of the sublime that modern art (including literature) finds its impetus and the logic of avant-gardes find its axioms.”

VIII a. The sublime carries both pleasure and pain. Pleasure derives from pain. b. The sublime is only present when the imagination fails to present an object that matches the concept. c. “We have an Idea of the world (the totality of what it is), but we do not have the capacity to show an example of it. We have the Idea of the simple (that which cannot be broken down, decomposed). But we cannot illustrate it with a sensible objectwhich would be a ‘case’ of it. We can conceive the infinetly great, the infinetly powerful, but every presentation of an object destined to ‘make visible’ this absolute greatness or power appears to us painfully inadequate. Those are Ideas of which no presentation is possible.” d. This is what modern art is all about, to present the fact that the unpresentable exsisits. e. Kant: fomlessness (absense of form) is a possible index to the unpresentable. f. Empty abtraction is also a presentaton of the unpresentable. This is what the abstract artists such as Malevitch would attempt. g. Lyotard blames the avant-gardes of flushing out presentations that are soley directed towards the gaze (awe of beauty?), steering the viewer away from the concept of the unpresentable.

THE POSTMODERN

VIX a. “A work can become modern only if it is first postmodern. Postmodernism thus understood is not modernism as its end but in the nascent state, and this state is constant.” b. Modern takes place in thw withdrawl of the real and according to the sublime relation between the presentable and the conceivable. c. “Modern aethetics is an aethetic of the sublime, though a nostalgic one.” d. The pleasure is that reason could exceed all presentation, the pain is that imaginiation or sensibility should not be equal to the concept.